These dozen stories are not memoirs, nor are they family histories. But they are inspired by Alice Munro's life, and by the lives of her Scottish ancestors, from the title story—where through a haze of whiskey her ancestors gaze north from Edinburgh Castle at the Fife coast, believing that it is North America—all the way to the final one, where we travel with "Alice Munro" today. As she writes in her introduction, these stories "pay more attention to the truth of a life than fiction usually does. But not enough to swear on."

"Masterful ... there are no pyrotechnics in [the prose], very little poetry. The few similes are apt but not dazzlingly so. There is suspense, but it is contrived without resort to any obvious devices. In short, Munro is the illusionist whose trick can never be exposed. And that is because there is no smoke, there are no mirrors. Munro really does know magic: how to summon the spirits and the emotions that animate our lives."—Washington Post Book World